What’s the Problem with Unchecked Government Spying? Visit the FBI Vault and Find Out

Over the last month, it’s been revealed that the United States government has been sweeping up unlimited amounts of data on private internet use, e-mail, text messaging, phone calls, and even postal traffic, all without warrants. What’s wrong with that? The most direct, literal answer is that it’s a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which requires the U.S. government to obtain a probable cause warrant from a judge, constrained by a specific time and place, before searching through and seizing a person’s private possessions or papers. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land in the United States, so when our government breezes by the Constitution’s requirements, it’s busting through our highest law to get what it wants.

Why worry about little issues like “legality” when we’re talking about human lives at stake? The immediate answer to this question is that there aren’t really that many lives at stake from terrorist attacks. Any death is sad, but we’re all going to die, and most of us will die from more easily prevented causes. All this massive surveillance is being conducted to stop occasional attacks that pale in comparison to strokes, car accidents and pollution in their danger.

A broader answer to this question is that secret, massive surveillance programs like XKeyscore and PRISM shove aside rule by law and replace it with rule by the discretion of the powerful. To see what that produces, visit the “FBI Vault”, a place where the Federal Bureau of Investigation posts old files that are the subject of frequent Freedom of Information Act requests. You’ll find the rampant use of investigatory and surveillance power in order for questionable purposes.

Moving from the 1960s through the 1970s and to the early 1990s, look up the file of John Denver. You’ll find that John Denver was being followed by President Richard Nixon’s administration for appearing at an anti-war rally that was purportedly part of a “Dump Nixon movement.” More recently, C. Boyden Gray, President George H.W. Bush’s lawyer, had used the FBI to uncover information about Denver’s drug habits.

These kind of prurient probes, entirely unrelated to national security, are enabled when the rule of law is replaced by the discretion of powerful people. Human nature has not changed over the last 20 or 40 years. If we allow the collection and warehousing of just about everyone’s private communications — whether it be highly implicating “just metadata” (phone and postal mail) or the entire content of communications (internet-based means) — then the people in power who have the discretion to abuse their power will do so. Think of your favorite president using this power. Now think of your least favorite president using this power. Whether it’s today or tomorrow, the power of unlimited warrantless surveillance will be used to mess around with innocents’ lives. I guarantee it.

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About the authorJim Cook

I haven't been everywhere, but I've lived lots of places in the USA: the North, the South, the East, the West, and places in between. Every place I've been, I've seen acts large and small of kindness, callousness and disregard. Here we are. What will we do?

4 thoughts on“What’s the Problem with Unchecked Government Spying? Visit the FBI Vault and Find Out”

The spying system is designed to protect the financial interests of the rich and powerful. Not only does maintenance of the system mean a huge transference of taxpayer money to the rich, but also it means that anyone who does something to threaten the military industrial complex’s stranglehold on the nation’s purse strings can be hounded. The treatment of Private Manning and Edward Snowden provides two examples of how minor (if any) damage to national security can be portrayed as a major threat to 1%’s wealth. Terrorists take advantage of this. For example, merely chatting in ways that they knew all along (before Snowden’s revelations) would come to the attention of the 1% is enough to close down official U.S. sites all over the world.

Wow — it’s completely related, Damen. It looks like the U.S. Government is using massive warrantless surveillance not just to catch the turrarists, but to drum up evidence against people for mundane crimes and secretly use that to railroad people into jail without due process. This is a big, big, big deal.

It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection. These are the times when maps fade, old landmarks crumble and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.